Oracle Forms, provided by Oracle Corp., is a component of Oracle Fusion Middleware, and is essentially a software product for creating interfaces and data entry systems for Oracle databases. In addition, Oracle Forms is widely used as a development platform for several of Oracle's packaged solutions versions, such as Oracle E-Business suite and Oracle Financials (formerly iFlex). Oracle Forms facilitates Oracle technology to design and build enterprise applications quickly and efficiently. Oracle Forms has an integrated development environment, and was originally developed to run server-side terminal sessions. Later on, Oracle Forms was ported to other platforms, including Windows, to function in a client-server environment. Oracle Forms applications take advantage of web technologies and service oriented architectures (SOA), and later versions were adapted and integrated with Java and web services.
In general, a DBMS (database management system) is toolset that organizes the storage of data. DBMS allows organizations to centralize, manage and control organization-wide data maintenance, manage integrated collections of data records, and manage the flow of corporate information. In large systems, a DBMS allows users and software to store and retrieve data in a structured way. The Oracle database (commonly referred to as Oracle RDBMS or simply Oracle) is an RDBMS (relational database management system) produced and marketed by Oracle Corp.
Oracle Database users may develop Oracle-compatible applications in various programming languages, such as Java and PL/SQL, with the use of tools such as Oracle JDeveloper, Oracle Forms and Oracle Reports. Oracle Forms relates to a software product for creating a visual UI (user interface) that interacts with an Oracle database.
Oracle Forms may support generation of multiple UI elements in order to interact with an Oracle database, including buttons, menus, scrollbars, text fields and graphics. In addition to the features of visual layout, editing Oracle Forms provides special functions called triggers, which are events triggered by the occurrence of user peripheral events such as keyboard strokes or mouse movements. Forms Builder is the component which may be used to create applications for interacting with Oracle databases
In Oracle Forms, the form's source code may be compiled into an “executable” file, that may be executed and interpreted by the OracleAS (Oracle application server) forms runtime module.
Oracle Forms Server (also “Forms server”) is an application server that is optimized for deploying Forms Developer applications to the Internet. Forms server may use the Forms Listener Servlet (a Java server side module) to start, stop, and communicate with the Forms runtime module. The Forms runtime module may be used to execute the form's source code contained in a particular Forms application. The Forms Listener Servlet may be used to manage the creation of a Forms runtime module for each client and manages the network communications between the client and its associated Forms runtime process.
Oracle Forms may use either Java Runtime Environment or Oracle JInitiator to run the GUI (graphical user interface) in conjunction with the OracleAS Forms Services and the Forms Listener Servlet, to provide the web-based forms runtime environment.
Oracle JInitiator, which is a JVM (Java Virtual Machine), may be called as a browser plug-in or an ActiveX control and used to for running web-based Oracle Forms client applications inside a web browser.
U.S. Pat. No. 6,070,177 to James Wei-Ching Kao et al. discloses a system for associating an audit history with a database form. A database document is displayed on a first portion of a display on network client computer. An audit history is displayed on a second portion of the display. The audit history contains information describing the transmission history of the document and any action taken with regard to the document. The audit history is updated automatically as the document is transmitted from one user to another user in the network. This patent is incorporated herein by reference in its entirety.